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MSHAG is a love it or hate it game. Before I bought my copy I checked out the two previous reviews of it here on RPG.net. One reviewer loved it. One hated it. There were two reviews of the game at Amazon.com at that time. One gave it five stars. The other wanted his money back.
I think what folks love or hate about the game is its simplicity. Most superhero RPGs on the market involve rules for tactical play, allowing for a detailed recreation of the craziness that is superhero combat. MSHAG does not provide that degree of detail. The game does not have range increments and defined combat maneuvers. It does not specify exactly how much farther a superspeed character can move in a turn compared to a mere mortal.
This lack of detail does, however, allow the game to recreate some of the wilder things superheroes do, by allowing players to attempt any application of their superpowers that they can dream up.
The game relies exclusively on a simple, card-based task resolution system. The cards serve the same basic function as dice do in most tabletop games. Play a card from your hand, add a number from the character sheet, try and meet or exceed the difficulty target number assigned by the GM. Having an appropriate Skill reduces the difficulty by one level.
There are a few more rules, allowing characters to occasionally play extra cards when extra effort is needed. Having a hand of four cards is like having your next four die rolls made in advance and choosing when to use them. The cards are not collectible and a full set is provided with the game.
All tasks are resolved this way and all tasks are resolved by the players, not the GM. Even when an NPC attacks, the attack is resolved by the player attempting to dodge, rather than by the GM attempting to hit. This frees the GM from needing a hand of cards for each NPC.
Having a simple universal task resolution allows players to attempt stunts that would be difficult in other games. For example, let’s say a superspeed hero wants to run through an entire city, looking at everyone on the street and comparing them to a photo he has of a wanted murderer. And he wants to do it in single turn. It’s exactly the sort of thing the Flash would do in the comics. In most games, the speedster would have a set movement speed of so many miles per hour. The GM would have to know how many miles of street the city had, how many citizens would need to examined, and so forth, to figure out if our hero had enough points in his speed score to pull this off.
In MSHAG, the GM just says, "Go ahead and try but it's going to have a insanely high target number." This is the answer to any complex stunt. If the speedster doesn’t have the ability to generate wind by waving his arms really fast written down on his character sheet anywhere, he can still try that too. Same system.
In play, I did find a downside to this versatility, however. My players found it advantageous to not define their characters' abilities too tightly, allowing them more room to try anything. For example, a character with invisibility didn’t define at the beginning whether she could turn others invisible or not. She just waited for a chance to try it in play. Personally, I would have thought that level of power definition would be made during character generation.
Another aspect of play that deserves discussion is the Doom Bank. The cards used in the game have suits that correspond to character attributes - Strength, Intellect, Agility, Willpower - and there is a bonus to matching the suit with the action you are attempting. But there is one more suit, the Suit of Doom. When you play a Doom card, instead of being discarded, the GM collects it and places it in the Doom Bank, to be used against you later.
I have heard concerns that this does not simulate comic-book play well, because it makes the later encounters in a story harder than the early ones. In comics, the argument goes, heroes meet earlier defeats then rise above them to best the final challenge.
In my play experience, however, the Doom Bank worked fairly well. Players enjoyed agonizing over whether to risk playing a high-value Doom card when they really needed to succeed. And, at the end game of one scenario, having the Doom Bank allowed the master villain to resist being mind-controlled just long enough to fire off the missiles full of mutagenic gas, upping the stakes for everyone.
Another aspect of the game that needs mentioning is the writing, which frankly could use some work. There are some brilliant passages in the book (the page dedicated to villains returning from apparent death is spot-on to the comic book adventure spirit) but overall the game suffers from advocating an adversarial relationship between the players and the GM. Advice for the players includes using comics to support arguments with the GM over a hero’s abilities. Options for the GM include the basic equivalent of awarding negative experience points. There are also some simple errors a little editing could fix, such as a chart with the headings in the wrong places.
The game is written with the assumption that players would rather play existing Marvel heroes instead of inventing characters of their own -- to the extent that the character generation system is in an appendix at the back of the book and the one sample new character is a joke (he has hedgehog powers). To be fair, it is called the Marvel Superheroes Adventure Game, so the idea of playing Marvel superheroes is not that much of a stretch. The game comes with several ready-to-play heroes including all the Fantastic Four, many Avengers, solo heroes such as Spider-Man and Daredevil, and several of the most popular X-Men. A short selection of established villains is included for the GM.
While we’re on the subject, the character generation system is partially random and partially based on player choices. The players are dealt a number of cards and can assign their values to attributes and powers any way they like. I’ve tested it by making the same character over and over with different random cards. Generally the characters average out about the same - as long as I spend more than one card on a given power, it tends to come out with an acceptably high enough value for the character concept. Every once in a while, however, the random element does tend to screw the potential character up. Ultimately, I have no real problem with the character generation system that is provided with the game -- its just the “you’d really rather play Captain America, right?” attitude that I find odd.
As an experienced gamer, I had no difficulty ignoring the game’s attitude problems to get to the viable system underneath. I believe, however, that they reduce MSHAG’s value as an introductory game for new players. Which is a pity, since it’s a solid, easy-to-learn, fast-playing system in an established setting that would otherwise be an ideal entry game for new gamers.
So, is MSHAG a good game? It’s a very good game if you want versatility, wild stunts, and fast play. Combat doesn’t bog down in measurements or charts. The fact that all actions are resolved by the players holds their attention and keeps them involved. The ability to replicate the wild, improbable feats found in comics makes this a good game for more four-color, Silver Age style adventures.
It’s not so good if you want to count the squares of movement on your battle mat or detail the exact parameters of your powers. It’s not so good if you want to take advantage of having better range modifiers or more points in a given attribute than your opponent. You have to run with the GM’s decisions on a lot of the finer points of detail.
What it does, it does well. But it doesn't do everything and it doesn't do what a lot of other games do. And I think that’s why folks love it or hate it.
